This application deals with a refurbishment assembly for heavy duty chassis and a novel bracket for maintaining said assembly in a chassis. Also disclosed is a method of creating or manufacturing such an assembly and its mounting on a heavy duty truck chassis.
Heavy duty chassis are common in the art and are attributed to heavy duty trucks generally manufactured by the commercial automobile companies. Such trucks include, for example Ford F250, 350, 450 and 550 four wheel drive solid beam axle trucks and their counterparts manufactured by other automobile manufacturing companies such as general motors, Chrysler and the like.
In an attempt to provide armored cars, or troop carriers that are heavily reinforced with steel for protection, it is necessary to provide a steel shell over a heavy duty chassis. This obviously adds weight to the chassis and the suspension systems for heavy duty trucks are not stout enough to handle all of this added weight, it is necessary to refurbish the heavy duty chassis with extra heavy duty parts.
However, there is a problem with just the simple replacement of heavy duty truck suspension systems with extra heavy duty suspension systems, in that, there is typically not enough room in and around such heavy duty suspension systems to allow the extra heavy duty suspension system components.
For example, when an extra heavy duty coil spring is introduced into a heavy duty truck chassis, there is no longer room for the adjacent shock absorber. Likewise, because an extra heavy duty suspension system also requires a compression bumper stop to absorb the initial shock of bumps and the like because of the extra weight, there is no room to find a placement for such a compression bumper stop.
It is estimated that an armored truck or troop carrier refurbished with the steel will weigh in the neighborhood of about 24,000 pounds, 10,000 pounds resting on the front axle and 14,000 pounds resting on the back axle. Thus, the extra heavy duty components need to be larger and more bulky. This invention overcomes these problems. Applicant is unaware of any like assemblies in the prior art.